Nobody Knows The Trouble That I've Seen
by Sole Soul Seeking Stars
Summary: Another take on the scene where Duke tells Mara about his mother. This entire story, by the way, is based on my own experiences. That being said, don't read it unless you're prepared for parental abuse. And trust me when I say this is the tame version.


They were two-thirds of the way through the bottle of bourbon by the time that Duke finished up his tale of woe. Mara, for once, held back her sharp tongue in favor of silence and occupied herself with the glass of amber liquid.

She only lasts for five minutes before choking on her bourbon in an effort to hold back peals of laughter. The liquid scorches her throat as she coughs, setting the glass down on the ground with as much grace as her limited mobility allows her too. Then the chuckles escape her, one by one, before she explodes into full-blown guffaws before settling into teary chuckles, giggling to the point of tears as her lungs struggle to take in oxygen.

For several endless moments, Duke sits, frozen. He'd expected sarcasm, snide comments, maybe even a nasty laugh here or there. But she was practically convulsing with uncontrollable hilarity, which inevitably led him to one conclusion, stated in a matter-of-fact tone. "You are drunk."

Then he raises his eyes from the floor and realizes how wrong he is. She may be laughing, but her tears are sobering and real. She's biting her lip in an effort to keep sobs from overtaking her, but the way her shoulders shake are telling him the stark truth. She practically screams with anguished mirth, curling in on herself in a way that completely ruins the image of the sadistic alien he thought her to be.

And all of sudden, she stops, sits up, and grins at him. It's angry and a little bit insane, a complete contrast to her self-assured smirks. He wonders if she's finally realized her true nature as a psychopath. Sure, she was manipulative and ruthless before, but all of her actions at least had some measure of control and sense. "Did you know that my mother used to call me a demon? This town, and you especially, ought to have borne the brunt of my sense of duty to live up to my mother's expectations, as all little girls hope to." Sickly sweet sadism drips from every word that slides out from between her jaws, tightly clenched in a parody of a smile that sends chills up his spine.

"No, no, I didn't know that," he replies, his tone as calm as he can manage while his mind races ahead to conjure multiple possibilities of what could possibly happen next.

Mara was certainly never forthcoming about anything, so, for now, he'd take what he could get.

"Love is such a twisted little imp, you know. It fills little girls up with false hope that if they just _try_ hard enough, their mothers will finally stop treating them like complete and utter _crap_!" The end of her sentence is almost a shriek.

Then her tone becomes impossibly soft. "You try and try and _try_ to be perfect, but the standards just keep changing by the second. One moment you're almost good enough, and the next... You can't help but start to feel as if there's something _wrong_ with you. That there really is something _dark_ and _evil_ and _twisted_ gnawing away at any _possibility_ of being loved. That everything she says is true. That you're a monster.

"And then you get old enough for her not to feel guilty when she punches you so hard that your head _slams_ into that table-" her palm _thuds_ against the side of her skull at the site of an old scar long since concealed by her hair- "And for a brief moment you think you are dying."

"A part of you hopes that you are," she whispers.

Duke's picture of Mara becomes cloudier with every word that falls from her lips.

"And then you get old enough to realize how much deeper the words cut. She makes you parrot them- over and over and _over_. She makes you answer her questions about who is abusing who. She makes you say that you are _abusing_ her. And the more you cry, the angrier she gets. She tells you that she is the only one who should be crying because you're the one hurting her.

"Then you start to go a little insane, because if you reply, she hurts you, and if you don't, it might be worse. So everything is bottled up deep inside the little fissure in your chest where, I guess, _love_ is supposed to go. And when you finally crack, your entire family ignores your bleeding wrists because they don't care if you die anyway."

Her eyes are drifting, and so is her voice. "Our worlds aren't so different, Crocker. Love is twisted in every realm and hate is ever-present to fill that void."

In that solitary moment, in the dark, cold room of his boat, his entire opinion of Mara collapses on the simple fact that his entire basis for his psychoanalysis of her was wrong.

He doesn't really know what to think of this woman sitting in front of him, the one whose hidden scars have finally come into full view.

So he picks her glass up off of the ground, pours them both a generous amount of bourbon, and hands her back the drink without a word.

A hint of her smirk reappears as she raises the glass to her lips and gulps it down in a single swallow. And they both pretend that the following tears aren't even there at all.

After all, even bourbon has its rules. It's like Vegas. What happens as a result of bourbon, stays locked away in the boozy depths of memory.


End file.
